We culled the web for unconventional stories about love, romance, sex, and everything in between. We should warn you that some of these will make you feel warm and fuzzy, and some will make you cringe. Happy Valentine’s Day.

In her traditional white satin wedding gown, Ann Belkov made a stately entrance into the wedding hall. But when she saw her guests, she threw her arms out and cried, “AT LAST!” For, at 75, she was a first-time bride.

Let us take this opportunity to treat Valentine’s Day as the day for Great Friendships—a way to honor the invaluable sisterhood in our lives, the community of women who surround us with joy, laughter, friendship, and fellowship.

Please, go ahead and settle into yourself. Your personality is what it is. Don’t waste another minute cringing about your social awkwardness. Just be who you are. You’re an introvert. You’re never really going to totally fix this, but it’s okay.

Maybe certain types of love are more suitable to certain stages in life. Maybe intense passion is not sustainable. Maybe comfortable cooperation, respect, and shared values are the most important qualities for married life.

There’s no better time for reflection than this moment of transition from the old to the new. In this special New Year’s Eve edition of Wednesday 5, we return to our popular Women of Reinvention series for its life-lessons and nuggets of wisdom. For some of us, reinventing ourselves is about survival; for others, it’s about new beginnings, or overcoming fear, or simply letting go of a past self and ushering in a new one.

The scents, the songs, the family traditions, the quirky (but lovable) guests—these are life-enriching deposits in our memory banks. We asked “Women’s Voices” writers to look back over the years and share with us the Thanksgiving reflections that make them smile.

When I first went to work as a museum exhibit designer, I wore jumpsuits and drove a Volkswagon bus, and I remember my younger girl, then perhaps 7 or 8, saying plaintively, “Can’t we have a station wagon? Won’t you ever be a normal mother?”

I have an embarrassing suspicion that there’s magical thinking involved too, like the idea that if I’m not married, I won’t get to live happily ever after. None of those fairy tales ever said that the maiden aunt got to live happily ever after. Usually she was eaten by a wolf.

“When I was walking down the aisle and my eyes met his, I had this cold chill, and I thought, ‘I do not want to spend the rest of my life looking at his face every morning,’ my friend Paula told me. She had expressed her misgivings to her bridesmaid the night before, but she’d been too embarrassed to step up then and say, ‘No way!’”